Empowerment
Strong leader
Getting people to rely on themselves is what good leadership (see The Complete Leadership package) is all about.
If you can do this people will perform at a higher level and realise that taking on responsibility is the way to personal success.
A strong leader is secure. He has no fear for his position as he is a valuable asset.
A confident leader will relish the idea of empowerment by delegation.
Delegation is covered in more detail elsewhere (see The Complete Time Management package).
Delegation can be done in stages beginning with smaller tasks and increasing in importance as the experience of the person increases. Make sure you provide the tools for the job, training, equipment a budget etc.
Many managers find delegation one of the hardest skills to learn and adapt to.
They feel that ultimately there will be nothing for them to do resulting in redundancy.
If you don’t delegate you will be failing not only yourself but those who work for and depend on you.
Delegation is about giving people responsibility along with the authority or power to carry out their actions.
You trust them to make decisions for themselves and for the benefit of all.
You build important bridges and alliances.
Failure leads to negative results
- Staff are not developed by avoiding exposure to different experiences
- Staff lose motivation
- Staff leave as a result
- General performance drops
- You personally end up over working
- You fail to evolve
- Your promotion prospects reduce
- People begin to complain regularly
The ultimate affect will be lost efficiency.
If people only have to rely on you then you will be solving all the problems.
Good delegation encourages people to take responsibility for solving their own problems.
Change
Delegation and the development of others will mean change.
Some people are adverse to change. They will stagnate and be passed by competitors.
Leaders have a vision and this means change.
If you can’t accept change you will not be a leader.
Credit
When you delegate and the resulting actions are successful don’t take the credit.
Make sure the person doing the job gets all the plaudits.
Make sure you let that person know they have done a good job.
It will increase their self worth and further motivate them to higher levels of achievement.
Appoint strong leaders
It may be tempting to appoint leaders a little further down the competence ladder than yourself.
They may be good but not very good.
If you are a confident leader you will welcome the comments of strong leaders even if initially they have not bought into your vision of the future.
This will only result in better management of your route to your goal (see Goal Setting - part 1).
You may decide to appoint less experienced leaders if budgets are tight and train them internally.
Joint effort
When you delegate you will achieve far more than you could have done by working alone.
Those that you delegate to will have differing skills and focus.
They will bring alternative ideas, enthusiasm and will probably do a better job than yourself.
When someone actually seeks empowerment it is not a challenge for authority but a genuine need to progress and develop themselves.
You should welcome people focussing on their own self development indicating high motivation.
Security
Delegation requires a win / win mentality. If your aim is to dump all of your work onto someone else your leadership credentials will end up badly dented.
To develop good leaders you must, in turn, be a good leader.
A good leader will not be frightened of risk (see The Complete Risk Management package) and will not exhibit a scapegoat mentality.